Over the vast subcontinent of India, when the monsoon rains have ceased and the harvest has been gathered in, there is a lull in the goings and comings of human life. At such a season, when the clear starry nights are neither too cold nor too warm, the time is favourable for people, young and old to foregather after nightfall and engage their leisure hours in entertainments or in stimulating or elevating occupations. Popular dances and pageantry are naturally included. The stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (in which the Bhagavad Gita is set), the great epics of India, offer them an endless mine of material from which to draw inspiration and joy.

Such is the natural setting into which the name “Bhagavad Gita” (Song of God) has to be related, before one can understand how this great masterpiece of contemplative philosophy came to be known as a song. Whether we take it to be a “celestial” or “divine” or a simple song sung by God Himself, whether we take the two adjuncts in “God’s Song” as equally applicable as a double epithet to a favourite philosophical work so popular with the masses of India (these interpretations being equally permissible according to the rules of Sanskrit grammar), the main fact for the lay reader to recognize would be that, in the Gita we have a highly philosophical work which has gained the status of an elevating scripture on a par with the Vedas and the Upanishads.

The Gita itself refers to other similar writings of seers (rishis) under the description of a “song “:

“Sung by rishis in many ways, severally and distinctly in [different] metres, and also in the aphoristic words of the Brahma-Sutras, replete with critical reasonings and positively determined “. (XII 4.)

The Gita, therefore, is a very popular well-known song, lulling and elevating, at once soothing and exalting, which has for its subject-matter wisdom-teaching of a very rare and superior order. We can more easily understand the figurative sense in which the Gita is a song when we remember that even in the West, writers like Plato have referred to Dialectic as a hymn (in The Republic, 532 A to C), and that even Dante calls his epic La Divina Commedia -the Divine Comedy. No better example of a text suitable at once for a song and a study in the field of what is called “the wisdom of the East” can be found in such a compact and convenient form.

The Gita may be said to be the finest flowering of wisdom, pure or applied, which is sublime and precise at once. Its growing popularity through the centuries and even in modern times is sufficiently explained, not so much by its cherished position among the religious textbooks of the Indian people in any closed or static sense, but because it highly deserves, by its universal appeal and by the high hope it holds out to all mankind, a permanent place among works referring to perennial and contemplative wisdom which can know no barrier of race, religion or tradition.